Publicness and human development: An illustration from BRICS

Publicness is far from being a consecrated concept in the human development or capability literature. Instead, it is common to find references to other expressions about ‘public’ such as ‘public reason’ or ‘public reasoning’, ‘public values’, and ‘public goods’. It is important to examine the key concept of ‘public reason’ in Rawls and how it has been discussed by Sen and Nussbaum. However, a concrete concern of this chapter is how to think more broadly in terms of publicness from a human development perspective. In order to make this discussion more concrete, the chapter considers the context of BRICS in terms of the provision of public goods, defining three different levels of publicness. By doing so, it dialogues with what Nussbaum called ‘the institutional side of political emotions’ in societies that have been going through key economic and societal transformations. The public sphere of human development is easier to theorize than to see reflected in concrete indicators.